Cellulose Photonics: from nature to applications

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• Dr Silvia Vignolini, Department of Chemistry, Cambridge
• Friday 09 June 2017, 14:00-15:00
• Oatley Seminar Room, Department of Engineering.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Hilde Hambro.

Nature’s most vivid colours rely on the ability to produce complex and hierarchical photonic structures with lattice constants on the order of the wavelength of visible radiation [1]. A recurring strategy design that is found both in the animal and plant kingdoms for producing such effects is the helicoidal multilayers [2,3]. In such structures, a series of individual nano-fibers (made of natural polymers as cellulose and chitin) are arranged parallel to each other in stacked planes. When distance between such planes is comparable to the wavelength of light, a strong polarised, colour selective response can be obtained [4]. These helicoidal multilayers are generally structured on the micro-scale and macroscopic scale, giving rise to complex hierarchical structures enriching their visual appearance.

Biomimetic with cellulose-based architectures enables us to fabricate novel photonic structures using low cost materials in ambient conditions [5-7]. Importantly, it also allows us to understand the biological processes at work during the growth of these structures in plants. In this talk the route for the fabrication of complex bio-mimetic cellulose-based photonic structures will be presented and the optical properties of artificial structures will be analyzed and compared with the natural ones

[1] Kinoshita, S. et al. (2008). Physics of structural colors. Rep. Prog. Phys. 71(7), 076401. [2] Vignolini, S. et al. (2012). Pointillist structural color in Pollia fruit PNAS 109 , 15712-15716. [3] Wilts, B. D, et al. (2014). Natural Helicoidal Structures: Morphology, Self-assembly and Optical Properties. Materials Today: Proceedings, 1, 177–185. [4] de Vries, H. (1951). Rotatory power and other optical properties of certain liquid crystals. Acta Cryst., 4(3), 219–226. [5] Dumanli, A. G., et al. (2014). Controlled, Bio-inspired Self-Assembly of Cellulose-Based Chiral Reflectors. Adv. Opt Mat., 2(7), 646–650. [6] Parker R. et al. (2016). Hierarchical Self-Assembly of Cellulose Nanocrystals in a Confined Geometry ACS Nano, 2016, 10 (9), 8443–8449 [7] Kamita G. et al. (2016). Biocompatible and Sustainable Optical Strain Sensors for Large-Area Applications Adv. Opt. Mat. DOI : 10.1002/adom.201600451.

This talk is part of the Engineering - Mechanics and Materials Seminar Series series.

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